Search Results

This chapter talks about penetration of quantification into literary discourse. Lovers of literature could resist information and wax nostalgic for the deserted island reading of their youths, but adventure novels of the long nineteenth century show how “the accounting of literature” could also be aesthetically enchanting. British and American adventure novels from the period register a productive tension: guided by atavistic, preindustrial texts, characters flee from civilized realms marked by information overload only to impose informational modernity on the deserted islands and lost worlds they find. The chapter also explores the limits and wonders of quantification by using a sustained multiscalar approach—a close reading of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, a literary-historical argument that draws on a dozen transatlantic adventure fictions, and a distant reading project based on keyword frequencies in a corpus of 105 adventure novels. The chapter does not only explain how nineteenth-century literature accommodated the rise of information but also the prospect that the digital humanities might begin to tell a deeper history of itself.

This chapter offers a discussion of Wendell Berry's five short novels, namely Andy Catlett: Early Travels, Nathan Coulter, A World Lost, Remembering, and The Memory of Old Jack. Andy Catlett is devoted to Andy's visit to his Catlett grandparents and his stay, immediately following, with his other grandparents, the Feltners. Nathan Coulter focuses on its title character's coming of age, a process marked by the early death of his mother, a violent break with his brother, Tom, the even more violent break between his father and brother, and finally the death of his grandfather. A World Lost shows the way a child responds to the death of a beloved other through narration. Remembering tells the story of Andy's losing his own adult world and finding it again. Finally, The Memory of Old Jack is the story of one who has lost nearly everything yet gained it again by living it deeply and well.

This chapter documents the dominant labors of loss around Lemuria as performed by metropolitan paleo-scientists. It is the very fact that Lemuria was a creation of science that makes it so attractive to all those place-makers, outside science's hallowed circle. These paleo-sciences make loss itself — in the form of lost worlds, lost times, and lost species — into an object of scientific knowledge production. Certainly, the premise that Earth as we know it today is only the latest in a succession of former worlds that stretch back into deep time is critical to the operating logic of these sciences. But, as importantly, there is the conviction that through scientific modernity's various knowledge practices, the disciplined scientist could and would apprehend what had vanished in former ages.

This chapter begins with a thick description of a turning point in Conan Doyle's life, drawing on his writing about his visit to Berlin in 1890 to report on Robert Koch's vaunted cure for tuberculosis. Here was the cutting edge of the profession, modern laboratory research, practiced by celebrity scientists like Koch who were national and imperial heroes. But was science advancing at the cost of its humanity? The Professor Challenger stories are examined next, with their charismatic but egotistic scientist-hero supported (and thwarted) by professional bureaucratic practices: The Lost World is the adventure of a scientific committee. The last section shows that Conan Doyle conceived history-writing as a reconstructive science like paleontology and, like many contemporaries, admitted no two-cultures divide, but argued for science as an activity of the imagination – both Challenger and the highly imaginative Sherlock Holmes exemplifying this.

This chapter presents Hirsz Abramowicz’s compilation of essays, arranged in five chapters. The first chapter deals with Lithuanian Jewish life and traditions, examining among other topics rural occupations, the shtetl, diet, and mental illness. The second is an account of reform and upheaval before the First World War, with sections on Jewish public figures such as Joshua Steinberg, Hirsh Lekert, and Anna Lifshits, and on tsarist prisons, Jewish gymnasiums, and so on. The third examines the First World War and its aftermath, with sections entitled ‘Joining the Militia’, ‘The Germans’, and ‘April 1919’. The fourth is a description of Jewish vocational education, focusing on ‘help through work’, agricultural schools, and other programmes. The final chapter consists of profiles of Vilna Jews such as Mark Antokolsky, Eliezer Kruk, and Moshe Shalit.

This chapter examines the ‘Lost World’ genre, a staple of late-Victorian popular fiction, exemplified by H. Rider Haggard’s stories featuring Allan Quatermain, and Ayesha, known as She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed. These fin-de-siècle tales, while ostensibly celebrating British Imperialism and the continuation of colonial power, reveal layers of anxiety concerning degeneration, the collapse of civilisation, the rise of the Victorian ‘new woman’, and perhaps most potently the fear of death. Canadian writer James De Mille, in his book A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder, inverted Victorian values to satirise the capitalist economy, and the glorification of war, by creating the Lost World of the Kosekin where wealth is a burden and death worshipped. The presentation of the Lost World as a Gothic Space allows for a critical examination of the way that Victorian cultural certainties were challenged, by divergent belief systems, and the mystery and terror of death.

This chapter analyzes the Old English poem The Wanderer. It suggests that the images of exile in that poem are themselves part of a participation in a culture and that even the lament for a lost world can affirm that world by reinforcing cultural stability by the depiction of the misery of its absence. It also contends that narrative persona in the poem undergoes a shift in perspective that transforms the inferior and essentially hopeless exile track of the Germanic world into the superior exile track of the Christian faith.

The chapter explores Casement’s Black Diaries, and their reception, through a discussion of three novels: Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912), Alan Hollinghurst’s The Swimming-Pool Library (1988) and Mario Vargas Llosa’s The Dream of the Celt (2010). In a move that embodies the homophobia that has so often plagued Casement’s posthumous life, Vargas Llosa depicts Casement’s Diaries as little more than the fantasies of someone deeply ashamed of their sexual taste. In The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst is able to stage the uneven power dynamics that defined Casement’s sexual encounters while also illustrating the erotic thrill offered by racial difference, contextualised through a genealogy of queer desire. Finally, the chapter concludes by engaging the Black Diaries alongside Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, which features settings and a character inspired by Casement, and explicating the novella’s insistence on the erotic quality of racial difference while also highlighting the underlying queer energy inherent to the imperial romance of the Boy’s Book.

This chapter looks at the nineteenth century and the historical context in which the stock figure of the ‘mad scientist’ first appeared, which was coincidentally a time of political agitation and cultural upheaval in Ireland. In nineteenth century Ireland, the line between science and tradition was blurred, and there was not always a clear distinction drawn between the ‘real’ and the supernatural. This is reflected in the works of Fitz-James O’Brien and Robert Cromie: O’Brien, a native of county Limerick, wrote short stories in which scientists consult the spirits of dead forebears for advice, while Cromie, a Belfast author of unionist conviction, set many of his Jules Verne-esque adventures in industrial enclaves surrounded by dangerous wilderness. Both authors work against a backdrop that is a cross between the Irish Gothic of the Protestant Ascendancy and the ‘lost world’ adventure stories that were becoming increasingly popular at the time.